Return to the United States & Recap

     I wanted to post one last blog as I have officially come to the end of the World Race journey, the most transformative year I could imagine. I want to start by thanking you all. Thank you first of all for the prayers, the power of prayer is undeniable. Thank you for the ways you supported me financially, emotionally, and spiritually. I cannot tell you how much it has meant to me to have a community who shows their love and support. The mission was to grow with God and to bring the Kingdom of Jesus to a lost and hurting world – I would say we met that mission every single day of the past year. 

     Over the trip we went to 9 countries on 3 Continents over the course of 11 Months (Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Albania, Romania, Lesotho, South Africa, Eswatini). There were about 30 of us who together partnered with more than 25 different churches and organizations. We served thousands of people in various capacities: working with children, farming, painting, construction, discipleship, evangelism, teaching, preaching, carrying things across mountains, hosting church and worship events, serving refugees, reaching unreached people with the Gospel, and much more. Regardless of all the different things we did, by far the most valuable and influential was simply building relationships with the locals wherever we were. 

     We did what we could to help people, to share the love of Jesus, to be a witness to Christ, and to bring the Kingdom where we went but interwoven in every day and in every circumstance you could see how it was God orchestrating everything to work together. It was Him who opened doors, He brought the necessary yet unlikely people together, He answered prayers, He worked miracles, He changed hearts, He guided, He provided for every need, and He grew his family. And beyond the Impact we saw around the world God made an even greater impact on my own life and on the life of every person on my team. 

     We left the US with only our backpacks but now we carry home countless testimonies, countless ways we encountered God, countless memories, countless tears, countless laughter, countless new friends, countless breakthroughs, and changed lives. 

     I would totally recommend the world race mission trip to anyone. I could say so much why I think missions are so important for everyone to do but instead I want to share a glimpse of the impact it had on my life.

     God used this year to totally 100% change me and the course of my life. I’ve always heard the Gospel is Good News, “Jesus is a pretty awesome powerful dude who died for my sins”, and although it sounded good, honestly it didn’t change anything. Somehow, I was totally missing the point. Before this trip I maybe went to church once a week but by Tuesday was back to my own agenda. I maybe attended a bible study or small group when I felt like it but didn’t care to make learning more about God a lifestyle. I would serve at the church because I liked to help people and it gave me something to do but not because I wanted to serve the Lord. I tried to be a good person only because I wanted people to like me. I listened to sermons at church for the self-help ways to improve my life. I didn’t like reading the bible, and on the real spiritual nights I would pray asking God to forgive me for sins that I fully planned on committing again. I believed in Jesus and wanted to go to heaven but I didn’t really want God to be more a part of my life than an occasional good feeling on Sunday morning or in times of need.

     I was happy with my life, I had a good degree, career path, job opportunities, good friends, good family, people who loved me, fun hobbies, the “American dream”. But spiritually I was left pretty empty and It honestly affected much more of my life than I thought it did at the time. Before the trip I was thinking there must be more to the Christian life and I must be missing it. This year I discovered that although the outside things looked good, I wasn’t actually living the Christian life at all. 

     I learned this year how It’s about a personal relationship with the Lord. It’s about falling in love with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. It’s about radical obedience to God, not because you have to, but because you are so in love and have such gratitude that all you want to do is obey. It’s about an unconditional love that changes your heart, your desires, your motivations, your emotions, your perspectives, your goals, the list goes on. It’s living from this place of knowing our identity in Him and being in such gratitude for who He is and what He’s done. It’s making the Gospel the center of our world: that the Kingdom of God has arrived for us through Jesus in the here and now and we have the option to repent and believe.

     It was not enough for me to just know about God. In the past 22 years of my life, I knew a lot about God. I grew up in the church, I went to Christian schools, but on this trip I went from having general knowledge about God to having a deep, personal, experiential, intimate, relationship with Him.

     It’s the difference between my friends in middle school who knew everything there was to know about Justin Beiber (his birthday, his sleep schedule, his favorite food, etc) versus Justin Beiber’s close friends and family who spent day in day out walking with him and doing life with him. They “knew” him, not just “about” him. 

     And getting to this place with God was like it is with any love relationship in life. The way you can picture that is thinking about two teenagers falling in love, it’s so effortless, they just can’t stop talking to each other, they want to do everything together, they know what the other person desires and they do it not because they have to but because they have this love for that person. Being in a relationship for them is the easiest thing ever. God designed for us to be in that relationship with Him and the deepest desire of our heart is that we ‘know’ Him. That’s what He truly desires with us and after traveling the world and being exposed to so many things I’m convinced there is nothing better in this world than truly knowing and truly following the Lord. He is so worth surrendering to and giving Him everything. We want to obey because we walk with Him, we walk with Him because we have fallen in love with Him, we fall in love with Him because we discover who He really is, what he has done for us, and the love He has for us. When I say we discover this, it’s not just knowing it in our head but it’s a journey of it sinking into our hearts.

     Someone asked me the greatest miracle we saw or heard about this year because we had seen healings, seen demon deliverances, seen the gifts of the Holy Spirit at work, heard about the Holy Spirit stopping witchcraft, heard about food multiplication… All these things were incredible but it was nothing like seeing a heart transformed. It was watching God transform a person’s life because only He could do it. Watching when new believers or people who had been putting God in a box let Him take over their life. The real miracle was when people left everything behind, dropped everything they had or thought they wanted, turned, locked eyes with Jesus, and followed Him. 

     Encountering the Lord was my biggest takeaway from the year and I can’t thank Him enough for what He did not only all across the world but also in my heart. It’s not about what our team did, all we did was give God our time and our obedience and we watched Him move. When we go on a Kingdom Journey with the Lord, we can expect to be changed.